Showing posts with label Neil Brand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neil Brand. Show all posts

Monday 13 July 2015

Blackmail and Brand at Saffron Hall

This is a review of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) with full orchestra at Saffron Hall

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 July

* Contains spoilers *

This is a review of a special screening, at Saffron Hall, of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), with a score by Neil Brand, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the conductorship of Timothy Brock




From the opening blasts on the brass in the overture to Blackmail (1929), composer Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand) establishes a contrast between a martial, accented tone, where Morse code is not out of place, and a softer one, complete with, in the ranks (no pun intended !) of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (@BBCSO), a celeste. As conductor Timothy Brock and he were to agree in the Q&A*, Saffron Hall’s (@SaffronHallSW’s) acoustic response is incredibly live, which made for a thrilling evening of silent cinema, adeptly accompanied by at least a hundred players.






Moving from a quickly rotating wheel to a police-van, crammed with listening / transmitting gear and personnel, so a tone of grandeur was established, and it was communicated – in scenes that led to an arrest where violent resistance was attempted – the impression that this was a film, too, of high energy and high anxiety, with ‘swirly’, kaleidoscopic string-effects that felt as if they were in tribute to Bernard Herrmann and his score for Vertigo (1958) (also, of course, Hitchcock).




Here, as for Underground (1928), an appropriate appreciation of pace is the hallmark of Brand’s writing, and, even in the quieter moment of the identity parade, he marks the presence of time in the moment by a chime, and soon after engages us with a jazzy feeling that he gives to muted trumpets (as well as nodding towards the signature-tune of Alfred Hitchcock Presents for the usual Hitch cameo).



The boldness of Hitchcock’s direction, and his love of symbolism, is all over this film, with plonking a waitress smack in the middle of Frank and Alice, after they have fought it out with another couple to get seated at the same table (momentarily, we have – till a better opportunity seems to present itself – one member of each couple facing the other in a stand-off) :


We ‘hear’ their words through the inter-titles, of which there is here a plethora, but he teasingly deprives us of their faces, and so their expressions (although, from the note that we see Alice take from her handbag, we know that she is not playing Frank straight**). Hitchcock, when Alice has given Frank the slip, also has the big shadows of ‘The Artist’ and of the man whom we come to know as Tracy all over where Alice is waiting for the former outside where he lives : there, after she has ascended through more shadow (with staircases cut away so that we can see their upwards progress), she then comes to be haunted by his laughing image of a jester.

Even before we get to his atelier, which madly – in keeping with having painted a jester – has the look of a mediaeval castle, those shadows, and Brand’s score, have told us that no good will come of a girl accepting an invitation to a Bluebeard’s dwelling of a place like this… Alice, who is willing to conform to the idea of a girl who just wants to have fun, just cannot resist exploring, and (with her host’s help, happy to be that close) creating an androgynous painted monster. Maybe, too, that little dress, so conveniently left out, is not meant ‘to be resisted’ ? – already, when she has toyed with getting into it, the commanding words Put it on have uneasy undertones in the orchestral writing, reminding us that this may not be the best fashion choice ever.

When, with what is perhaps spontaneous, but no longer a borderline playful removal of Alice’s own clothing***, the pair end up tussling, it is a struggle of shadows that we see – and, of course, we are catapulted forward twenty-five years to imagery of Grace Kelly, resisting attack from Robert Cummings, in Dial M for Murder (1954) (although the hand that emerges is with the knife – in 3D (yes, it was so made), it seems to come out of the screen).




Afterwards, strings and an eerie kind of playing [for those who had not seen, we were told in the Q&A that it was not a theremin, but the effect of bowing a vibraphone on full****], give the immediate psychological significance – although, by contrast, Hitch and Brand make Alice seem very purposive when dressing, covering her tracks, and leaving.

However, the shadows are there, and Alice now seems to descend a toy staircase (as if she is beginning to disassociate – as, later on, in Marnie (1964), which Brand acknowledged was in his mind now). Soon, then, we hear and are shown, in how she hesitates to cross the road, and in the daggers that she hallucinates in the neon of Piccadilly Circus (against which, not for the last time, she seems so small), her purpose is much less so, as she drifts all night…

At this stage in the proceedings, and by kind courtesy of Neil Brand himself, a link to his piece in BFI's (@BFI's) Sight & Sound (@SightSoundmag) :




With the police at the scene of the crime, once the alarm has been called, the military-type theme returns, in a heavy guise. Then Frank arrives, and is directed to have a look around : when he recognizes first Alice’s glove, and then that the dead man is The Artist, the moment is pure theatre, but we do not linger with him, as there is dramatic irony in Alice’s mother saying, via the inter-title when she has brought in a cup of tea, that anyone would think that Alice had not been to bed. And then, just as soon, Alice is left alone to get out from under the covers, in her clothes and even shoes, and with her thoughts. As she repairs her overnight damage in the mirror, a little touch of the sound of Vertigo, and we somehow know that life is never going to be the same :


* At the breakfast table, when asked to cut the bread, the combination of hand, shadow, and knife brings it all back

* Behind the counter, and against the towering shelves, Alice White, newsagent’s daughter, looks small again

* We have a spectral, soft-focus Alice, but we also have Frank, showing her the glove, and (ironically) saying This is the only clue that you were there

* When Tracy comes onto the premises, Hitchcock steps back with the camera, and we have space for deliberation, with these figures just standing there – in the Q&A, Brand told us that, scoring this, he was challenged, and just had to strip back and think of the sub-text

* Tracy reaching towards Frank’s pocket, somehow knowing that the glove is in there – and then he shows us that he has its pair


Vertigo seem to be with us again : when asked in the Q&A, Brand said that he only quoted the themes for Hitchcock Presents and, when the patrolling bobby knows nothing of what is happening high above, that of Dixon of Dock Green. However, he said that the chordal structure of the main theme from Vertigo, with its elevenths and thirteenths, is capable of being both major and minor, and Brand was glad to learn that a Bernard Herrmann sound had been heard through the use of this structure, with which he meant to evoke film noir, but without directly quoting the theme*****.

At the heart of the plot, the nub of the problem faced by Frank and Alice is in the awkward breakfast and its aftermath, with Frank at the back, on the step, and Tracy sniffing the cigar that he forced Frank to buy him. Elsewhere, though, Mrs Humphries is calling at Scotland Yard, with the note that Tracy had left for her lodger. With his score, which Brand was keen to stress to us that Timothy Brock had orchestrated and developed, we hear how paced it is, and how it is in and out of themes as emotions rise and fall.

So, when a search is under way, looking for Tracy through a montage of mugshot books and wanted bills, the martial quality in the music is there in louder form, but, very soon after, we have jazzy notes accompanied by strings : talking about Hollywood orchestras later, Brand said that that string players were always classically trained, but those on trumpets or saxes were jazzers, who were able to deliver with an immediate, full sound.


When the photo of Tracy is found, we are given harp glissandi, and then, on xylophone, dashes and dots of Morse. In Frank’s perception, Tracy becomes, as he calls him, a suspicious looking man with a criminal record, and, with a big sax swagger, he leans cockily on the mantelpiece – domesticity itself, and the assertion that a man, once fingerprinted, is assumed to lose credibility. In large form, a reference to that Vertigo sound again, before we end up with ‘brassy’ negotiation, and then, with ‘pregnant’ strings – Tracy trying to persuade himself as much as Frank that he has reason to be believed over and above Alice and him (my word against hers).

But his nerve does not hold, when other police arrive, and the whirl / swirl of the orchestra must reflect as much his state of mind as Alice’s confusion, having tried to tell Frank that she does not want him to do this and that she has something to say, but being silenced. Out through the window Tracy goes, and we revert to the opening image of the van-wheel in motion, as he flees, but keeps encountering police officers, to whom, rightly or wrongly, he thinks that his status must be known:


So it is that, after he has paused for a drink, we see him as the pursuers do, as a speck against the hugeness of the façade of The British Museum, between whose monumental columns he passed, and which towered above him. Inside, massive Egyptian heads also stress his insignificance, and his likely fate being in larger hands, and – when he descends a chain – there is another huge head behind him, with Brand giving us heavy brass, and throaty trombones. A momentary glance into the Reading Room, and then – terribly small again – Tracy is on the breast-like dome, and, next, has plunged through the glass, back into the famous space below.


As at the opening, when Alice is waiting for Frank (and berating him for keeping her waiting), we are at Scotland Yard. There is an open, gracious theme as she asks to speak to the inspector, and is told that she needs to fill in a form. In terms of instrumentation, we are down to her small voice, and, when she is shown in, we find that Frank is there : again, he is wishing to head her off in the light of Tracy being implicated. Just when she is about to speak, news of what happened to Tracy obliges the inspector to leave her in Frank’s charge.

As they leave the room, we can see her torment in her tortured hand on her bag, and then, now that she tells him, and when Frank finally realizes what did happen, he drops her hand (with nothing offering a way back).




At this dramatic conclusion, the applause was enthusiastic.

Brand was welcomed to the stage, where he warmly embraced Brock, and where the orchestra and both men took several curtain-calls : the film had been honoured by this playing, and this score, and this first venture by Saffrons Hall and Screen had been very well received.


But do not take one's word for it, as there is verification by Tweet here, with even a link to another review :






End-notes

* Which was hosted by Saffron Screen’s (@Saffronscreen’s) Rebecca del Tufo (@BeccadT), since this successful community cinema, also based with Saffron Hall at The County High School, was its projection partner for the evening.


Neil Brand, Timothy Brock, and Rebecca del Tufo at the Q&A (left to right)


** Seeing, further on, the portrait of Frank as a constable in Alice’s room suggests that they have been going steady for a while (he has now risen through the ranks), as does the dutifulness with which, when prompted, he gave her a peck on the cheek when she has waited for him after work. Is having him as a beau more to satisfy her parents’ needs than hers ? (My Russian friend, pragmatically, had no sympathy for Alice for putting herself in harm’s way with The Artist (and being no better than she should be), but that is just she…)

*** Contrast with the mucking around, even with a stranger, in Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930), which Brand (and Jeff Davenport) played for us at Cambridge Film Festival 2014…

**** One heard / seen recently when, in chamber configuration, Britten Sinfonia (@BrittenSinfonia) performed Joey Roukens’ new work Lost in a surreal trip (2015) (where these ears, at least, detected North by Northwest (1959)).

***** And, on the use of the theme itself in The Artist (2011), Brock and he said that they gathered that the theme had been used as a place-holder, which, when those composing for the film did not satisfy the director with anything else, simply came to be used at that point in the film : Brand agreed that the direct use of the theme not only is a musical strength that is not ‘earnt’ by the film, but also that it inaptly connects us straight to the pair of Kim Novak and James Stewart.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Friday 23 January 2015

Hints of Schnitzler at Slapstick Festival

This is a review of The Marriage Circle (1924) with harp score from Elizabeth-Jane Baldry at Slapstick Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 January (1 February, updated with commentary on the film / more of the introduction)

This is a review of The Marriage Circle (1924), as introduced at Slapstick Festival by Lucy Porter and screened with a new score from,
and performed by, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry on Thursday 22 January 2015



The introduction
Lucy Porter’s rather scatty introduction – but we forgave her that for her enthusiasm for the film to come (with even an assurance of A raunchy sex-scene involving a boiled egg*) – conjured with names such as Warner Bros, Ernst Lubitsch and Marie Provost (who, as Lucy said, stole every scene)…




We learnt, also, that it was Ernst Lubitsch’s second feature, after having come to Hollywood at the behest of Mary Pickford. [The screenplay was ‘drafted’ – so the word has it in the credits – by Paul Bern, after the stage-play by Lothar Schmidt.] Adolphe Mejou (Professor Stock) was to become best known for Howard Hughes’ The Front Page (1931), and, for The Birth of a Nation (1915) [directed by one of Pickford’s fellow United Artists], actor Monte Blue (who gives us the smooth, if guileless, Dr Braun) had been a stuntman.

More curiously still, Lucy dispelled the story that Marie Prevost had committed suicide and been eaten by her dog : it appears that (a little as in >The Artist (2011) ? - please also see below), she had actually ‘piled on the pounds’, but then dieted to excess, and succumbed to malnutrition. As Lucy commented, an unusual piece of information to precede a comedy, but all was well, because, when Elizabeth-Jane Baldry had been enthusiastically welcomed, they quipped again about that moment with the boiled egg !



The score
Even more so than exponents of the guitar, those of the harp love the form that their instruments take. Yes, sax-players, too, will exhale breathily through their instruments, and also use the sound of their opening and closing keys, and the rods and key touches that operate them, but a concert harp is large (so is, in its way, a theorbo – with its long, free strings), and hence, for example, tapping, knocking or running one’s fingers along the soundboard or body all have much resonance to them.

Composer and harpist Elizabeth-Jane Baldry is acutely aware, in her film-scores for solo harp, that cinema is not only a visual, but also a tactile medium, and so she has given great thought to being ingenious with the production not of every sound-effect (for this is not [attempting to be] live foley, and the best accompaniment to silent film is more like poetry than absolute mimesis), but the ones that psychologically speak volumes** (in a highly Freudian film), amongst which are :

* The springs of Professor Josef Stock’s exercise-machine (in which, to the exclusion of his younger wife Mizzi (Marie Prevost), he seems overly interested)

* A shutting series of doors (there are many opening and closing doors in The Marriage Circle) as Dr Franz Braun leaves the Stocks’ apartment

* Mizzi’s shock, as she depresses a cluster of notes on the piano keyboard, when she realizes that she has already met Charlotte’s husband

* Chimes that reinforce the sense of urgency as Dr Braun realizes that he cannot afford to wait for another taxi

* Tense moments when the telephone jaggedly rings and is answered to significant effect




The film is a delight, but bring an intelligent piece of cinema alongside a score that has viewed the film with great intelligence and which is played with conviction and verve, and everything is enhanced, the knowingness of the screenplay and direction, the sharpness of the editing, and the depth of the acting :




The synergy has been demonstrated again and again, from (to name but two) Neil Brand’s (@NeilKBrand’s) playing Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) (1930) at Cambridge Film Festival / #CamFF 2014 (@camfilmfest) to Elizabeth-Jane with The Phantom of The Opera (1925, but revised 1929) at the curious St Bart’s Hospital Pathology Museum… !

To give just a flavour of Elizabeth-Jane’s skilled approach, because one really does need to hear it live, one can characterize the accompaniment to the opening titles as being suitably strophic, and then, in the opening scene (as Professor Stock (the hangdog Adolphe Menjou) considers the state of his socks), a hint of lullaby – odd, we think, because we soon realize that it is morning, not night, except that, yet the scene develops in such a way that Stock and his wife both take a turn to dive back under the covers !

And that is where Elizabeth-Jane weaves in what we probably realized, if at some subliminal level, was a calypso, contrasting with this scene in Vienna in 1923, but for a purpose. Later, comes tango, too, and what she usefully identified afterwards (since a name to put to it in the in-screen notes had been lacking) as the cha-cha-cha.

To those elements, often in varied form and more disguised than this description can suggest, she adds, then, a theme suggestive of displacement (as we switch from the perspective of the street to what turns out to be that of Stock), one of transformation (when Mizzi powders herself) and then re-engagement with the calypso (she drapes herself carefully on the chaise longue), and, just before it, captures the world-weariness of Dr Braun at his practice.

So, in using the exoticism of the calypso in particular, this lovely score gently let us in on the secret of a world that we can pretend to be exterior to, but with the frisson of interiority. If, as the film goes on to show us, Mizzi is careful about arranging many aspects of what she is about, even more so is Elizabeth-Jane, with her skilled performance evoking the shifting, sometimes playful, and always ironic world of the Vienna that we are shown :

Conveniently, of course, making palatable the infidelities and lascivious desires seem those of a libertine folk in another land (as, in its more patent way, does Menschen am Sonntag), and so enjoyable by licence, almost by proxy, as we might that suggestive moment, at breakfast, with a thick, dark coffee – and a boiled egg !


Now added : more commentary on the film itself

Nicely restored, and with only occasional use of segments from an inferior-quality print (or a few jumps within scenes in the latter part), what we were shown seemed a very complete survival*** of a film from ninety years ago : it was only those tiny technical imperfections that served to remind that it had such a provenance, because the film is so fresh.

By contrast, however much some may have talked of The Artist (2011) with the hope that its audience would be inspired to seek out films from the so-called silent era, this film and it have nothing in common : one can barely believe that anyone credited the latter as a modern silent film, or even as in genuine homage to the period. Indeed, the comparison is almost as little cogent as suggesting that Titanic (1997) was going to cultivate a real interest in marine engineering and / or biology.

So, for example, the contrasted, sparing use of inter-titles in The Marriage Circle, with some of them as ironic as There is more danger in dancing than in dining (and so serving another cause than reporting speech, or facts), has several implications : the film-makers expect an element of lip-reading (or of construing gestural language used for our benefit), and they throw us back both on our wits, and on taking as many cues as possible from the composition of shots, scenes and story, e.g. how light (literally and otherwise) is being used, and what it highlights or throws into relief.




When Charlotte is at Mozart Gasse 12, not so much plucking as wrenching roses on her balcony, the dropped bloom (brought out, in the score, by a downward glissando) is more weighty than the apparent lightness suggested by what is visible, as the inter-title has advised us… Likewise, in the case of Franz Braun’s earlier arrival (with the parcel that we saw him carrying earlier – and which turns out to be flowers for his wife Charlotte), the scene has been set up by her singing Grieg’s setting of Ich liebe dich**** (‘I love you’) when Mizzi comes to call on her.

It develops with Mizzi accompanying Charlotte (though she does not know to whom Charlotte is singing), and is then punctuated by our knowing response to the inter-title Did you ever see a man like him ?, which sets out her words to Mizzi. The moment when Mizzi powders herself has already been mentioned, and there is a wonderful freedom and delicacy to how this scene is lit, before, with the collusion of her maid, we then see her, in a very staged way, work out how to comport herself on the chaise-longue, ready to ring the doctor.

His ultimately purporting, caught in guiltiness, to reach for Mizzi’s pulse is done with such knowingness, but we do not even know the best of it yet – that, as this is Wien (Vienna, the home of psychoanalysis), his partner and he specialize in Nervöse Leiden, ‘nervous disorders’. For this is 1923, and, in 1926, Arthur Schnitzler was to write his Traumnovelle, on which Stanley Kubrick was to found the screenplay of his Eyes Wide Shut (1999) (also for Warner Brothers).




As Brief Encounter (1945) also suggests (or, since then, Vendredi soir (Friday Night) (2002) and Ficció (Fiction) (2006), for example), we may be willing an outcome, but the films have other ideas, and we can be caught short by finding what they are :

In the case of Ficció, the considerable tension that has been built up for much of the film, and how it resolves, is a work of sublime restraint. In The Marriage Circle, by contrast, the closing gesture, although daring, releases us more casually, and in a carefree spirit, later caught also by that of Some Like It Hot (1959) : although the daringness to question norms is there, we are swept away from contemplating it overly much beyond as caprice, as a light ending to a film that has challenged our morality (in the six weeks or so from 25 May to 5 July), and found us wanting what ?


End-notes

* Meret Oppenheim, eat your heart out !

** In Elizabeth-Jane’s score for The Phantom, we had the sound of the unusual alarm, which warned of intruders in the cavernous parts outside The Phantom’s dwelling.

*** However, information suggests that, when The Museum of Modern Art did so, with funds from The Film Foundation, it ran to 103 mins…

**** To a text by Hans Christian Andersen, though commonly sung in German translation.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday 2 October 2014

Was sagst du, Mensch ?

This is a Festival review of People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag*) (1930)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 October

This review is of a screening of People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag*) (1930), which was a special event at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF) on Friday 5 September at 4.00 p.m.

The naturalness of director Robert Siodmak’s People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) (1930) beguiles us, and persuades us that what we are seeing might be true – an effect that is part of the immediacy of Neil Brand’s (@NeilKBrand’s) and Jeff Davenport’s live accompaniment.

Even for those of us who could construe the German in the slide at the beginning, and learn that what we were about to see was around 90% complete (some 1,800 metres of a known length of around 2,000 metres), nothing seemed to be missing, and the restoration was so clear that it did not leave us distinguishing different parts of the footage.

After the event, what one is left with is the impression of the morals and activities of the weekend in Berlin, spent by the lake at Schildhorn, and one has to pinch oneself and say that this presentation of life (outside of the candid shots of contemporary Berlin) is no more truthful than a newsreel of the day : that is the power of cinema, and of exposures that were not only clear, but insightful and affecting, that they can speak to us to-day when care has been used to present them alongside themes that match their moods, but had a feeling if not always of energy as such, then of being alive.


That, too, is something that we would come to associate with screenwriter Billy Wilder, whether in Some Like it Hot (1959), or Sunset Boulevard (1950), and is as good a reason as any to be interested in this film…


Over at TAKE ONE, Mike Levy has more observations about the film / performance...




End-notes

* Might we still write Menschen am Sonntag, or would it more often be Leuten - without the full sense that these are real, human people ?




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Thursday 31 October 2013

Öd und leer das Meer

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

31 October

* Contains spoilers *



89 = S : 15 / A : 16 / C : 16 / M : 10 / P : 14 / F : 16


A rating and review of Nosferatu (1922)


S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

Mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17) = 9






In acknowledgement of the fine live accompaniment of Neil Brand (@NeilKBrand)

At the end of to-night’s screening, I quickly read through the music credits, some by Hans Erdmann, that had been used to try to recreate his lost score for Nosferatu (1922) : at the end, one of the (excessively ?) summery themes that had been present at the start recurs as Hutter arrives back and kisses Ellen. Not a mood that lasts, although it appeared that Hutter had raced Count Orlok’s ship to Wisborg to protect her from him, which he then (save merely being there) does not do, even when she points out Orlok’s face at the window and says that he is there night after night – or seems powerless to do.

Continuing with the music, for the moment, one piece, a frivolous one (popularly given an accompaniment in the tapping of typewriter keys ?), is used when the letter from Hutter reaches home, seemed quite out of place for anyone with a familiarity with the reception of popular classical music to use. It was then that I realized with certainty that various compositions had been compiled, for the sub-Brahmsian summery and romantic music might have been written for this film, set in 1838.

Some instruments, maybe inevitably, came to the fore in the scoring, such as the xylophone, bass-drum, double-bass, and even a bass clarinet, as did a ground-bass, a creepy series of rising intervals, and chiming effects. All in all, though the film has to have an accompaniment, I felt that Neil Brand’s live playing at Cambridge Film Festival felt as though it did far more with far less :

We are several times shown, in an intertitle, the warning not to let the shadow of Nosferatu be cast upon one, and this score, at times, felt as though it were not just casting a shadow on the film, but overpowering it. The beauty of what Brand improvised – to continue this theme of choking – is that it allowed the film space to breathe, did not overlay the visual element with too much heavy meaning.

There is much meaning to be had here, with beautiful images of The Empusa at sea, and of the waves meeting the sea at Wisborg, where (amidst the iron memorials) Ellen likes to be, looking out at the water : for sheer beauty of the cinematography, these shots deserve to be relished.

Paper communications between Knock and Orlov in alchemical, magical symbols – such as one might get by putting a page of plain text in the font of that name – are but part of what is going on, since Knock telepathically knows when The Master is on the sea, getting nearer, or is dead.

Ellen, too, receives communication at a distance. When she sits up in bed at the time when fearful Hutter (who even tries to hide under the duvet) is about to be attacked in bed, she cries out – the doctor comes, and says that it is disturbances of the blood, blood on which Orlok feeds, of course, and is about so to do on her husband’s. Later, when both men are heading for Wisborg (there must be something missing that explains how Hutter knows that he is imprisoned), there is a sense, when Ellen calls out that ‘He is coming’ and she will go to him, she may no longer mean Hutter…

At the beginning, we see Hutter’s carefree expressions, but his delight in surprising Ellen and swirling her around before presenting her with the bouquet that he has picked is balanced by her asking why he killed the pretty flowers, suggesting a disposition to the melancholic, as may her appearance, her hair.

Hutter may not later choose the best language, by saying that he is going to the land of thieves and spectres, to make her feel assured of his safety (one feels that he is playing, although perhaps knowing that he plays with what he does not understand : his dashing the book to the ground after the night at the inn suggests denial), but he seems apt to rush off and leave her just like that. However, not just, one feels, that no woman in those times would be left alone, she is put in the care of the Harding couple, where she turns out to be a sleepwalker, who could have come to grief, if Harding had not caught her when she falls.


So, Ellen’s case maybe is not be taken superficially, and maybe the connection that Orlov, admiring her neck in Hutter’s cameo, makes with Ellen is some sort of unholy triangle of lust, where blood is not just sustenance (and he has tasted Hutter’s) : he wrote to Knock in the first place, because he desired a desolate property there – and where more desolate than these deserted warehouses, into which he can import his pest-laden coffins ?

He desired the property, he desired Hutter at his castle (just so that he could first feed on him, then lock him up away from Ellen ? Hutter’s papers, signifiying his agreement to the transaction, are never going to be returned, if Hutter does not leave), and he desired to be near Ellen and infect Wisborg. If Orlok has Hutter and Ellen behave according to his plans, then those plans have taken insufficient account of the fact that, in ein ganz sundlos Weyb, he desires what can destroy him.

The book from the inn, which Hutter finds with him at the castle, he tells Ellen not to read, but she does, of course, read it, and finds her fate. Struggling with it – and, importantly, not acknowledging that she has accepted it by symbolically throwing open the window facing Orlok – she disturbs Hutter, who has not even been able to offer the protection of staying awake to watch (which may signify that Orlok subdued him by taking his blood).

Significantly, he is sent not for an ordinary medical man, but for Bulwer, the Paracelsian professor (who has earlier been demonstrating the wonders of the Venus fly-trap and the like), and Hutter does not hesitate to follow the instructions. It is that he, of all people, will understand the nature of the struggle in which Ellen has been, not that she expects to survive it ? Of the triangle, Hutter is the survivor, and we have no sense of whether he can resume any life, as we are shown the destroyed castle of Orlok.

This is where I ended with my thinking in the other review – that there is, somehow, a sympathy for the vampyr, who poetically seeks out what is most likely to destroy him, in Ellen as the sinless sacrifice (the translation mistranslates ‘Weyb’ as ‘virgin’). His stiff, occasionally slightly hesitant demeanour, the doors, hatches and coffin-lids that open and close at his command, and the true horror as his form becomes upright in the hold of the ship, and he emerges from its hatch : he has so much power, and yet risks so much to feast on the bewitching Ellen.

A truly poetical meditation on the self-destructive impulse, which disguises itself from its possessor in the form of an obsessively thought- and carried-out plan.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday 12 January 2013

Gala with a glitch

This is a Gala review of Underground (1928), screened in NFT1 at the BFI

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

10 January

This is a Gala review of Underground (1928), screened in NFT1 at the BFI

Confession : I am not very practised (or confident) with how to view silent film :

* self-perpetuating lack of exposure to the field

* which means that my lip-reading* never gets better

* and disinclines me to make the effort to choose silent


For I find the concentration needed even greater than for a poorly subtitled film, where there is the anxious race to read and make sense of captions before the next ones come up (and, necessarily, the one in hand disappears).

None of this deterred me from this gala screening:


It had all the elements : a Q&A (and hosted by Francine Stock, to boot); the buzz of a first night at the BFI; in Underground, the restoration, by the BFI, of a film 85 years old; the involvement of silent-film musical interpreter Neil Brand, not as accompanying musician this time, but as composer of the score; and the tie-in with the 150th anniversary of the tube, with a film that almost made a character of its tunnels, staff, trains.

It brought out all sorts, from the train enthusiasts (there was one on the panel, with a looping presentation of stills) to, as it were, the silent crowd, and, of course, film buffs in general (into the latter two categories of which Brand and Stock** fitted, as did Bryony Dixon (curator at the BFI) and ?? Ben Thompson ?? (from the team of restorers)).

However, there were only two drawbacks, the minor one that, with a panel of four, each of whom had to be given a say, there was only time for five (it may have been four) audience questions, and the major hitch, which had Brand leaping from his seat and disappearing within minutes, which was that the soundtrack was no longer in synch with the projection (which, apparently, it had been earlier).

So, for example, an urchin playing on some sort of whistle was heard before he was seen. As Brand had, of course, carefully scored each moment of the 84 minutes, it was immensely distressing for him (hence his sudden exit to voice his concern), but it seemed from the apology at the end from the BFI’s director that there had been a lack of confidence that stopping the film would have allowed the problem to be remedied***.

I asked for a complementary ticket to allow me to see it as it should have been, because, although there was no doubt of the power and skill of the scoring (and of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s performance****), the concentration involved in hearing a soundtrack that did not match the visuals compounded my interpretative impairment.
That apart, it was a grand evening, and I was pleased to be able to talk briefly to Neil Brand again and offer my congratulations (and commiserations). This is why :



I had heard Brand talking to Sean Rafferty last year, on Radio 3’s late-afternoon programme In Tune (one could equally say early-evening, as I choose not to say ‘drive-time’), and was very interested both in what he had to say about the film’s dynamics, and to hear not only some of the music, but also how it had been composed. So I knew that Anthony Asquith, son of the prime minister of that name, had been the art director, I knew a skeletal amount about what the film dealt with, and I had heard Brand’s palpable enthusiasm for this commission.

I knew, therefore, that I wanted to see it, and, when I saw Brand at the Silent Film Festival (I only managed to see one film, though, where he had been playing with Mark Kermode’s band The Dodge Brothers) and then at Festival Central, I learnt that all the attention was focused on a likely release timed with the tube anniversary.

This film – including in its original sense - is terrific, and there is no doubt that the patient work of restoration, of composing the score, and of recording and tracking it has been an excellent use of resources. I want only to say enough about it that is consistent with leaving it to unfold to a new viewer, but showing what there is to be appreciated.

My Tweet will have alerted to the scheming and self-centredness of Othello, but (in no particular order) there is also, as Bryony Dixon put it, a love quadrilateral, a fight and other moments of tension, shots of trains and escalators in and around Waterloo tube-station, a magnificent chase, and a picture of the metropolis and a romantic trip to (as a member of the audience asserted, since no one knew) Hampstead Heath. What more could one want... ?


End-notes

* It is a useful adjunct to indistinct speech, as a clue (or cue) to what is being uttered, but a different proposition, I find, with no speech sounds. A film of this kind has few inter-titles (have they always been called that?), and for me, used as I am to the dialogue driving many a scene, there’s a frustration at not knowing what is said.

** Aurally, it has the ring of a partnership, warehousing, maybe, designer goods.

*** When I talked, at a later date, to Cambridge Film Festival director Tony Jones, he was confident both as to the nature of the problem, and how the technology caused would have made it not capable of easy remedy : he also seemed to know, but lost me in the detail of the technicality, how it should have been done, and so would not have been beyond repair on the spot.

**** Brand provided information about how the recording from a live performance at a screening last year, once the audience noise had been taken off, had to be intermixed with taping from that event’s rehearsal. Here, too, there had been a technical issue, because the frame-speed of the projection when the two had been recorded differed !


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Monday 23 April 2012

What Bruno Bettelheim has to tell us about all sorts of stories

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 April

Some people (no names mentioned!) are quite dogmatic about what BB postulated about fairy tales:

It's a bit like being a strict Freudian* and - as Arthur Koestler expressed it in Bricks to Babel (1980) - filtering out everything that is inconsistent with your adopted (to be pretentious) Weltanschauung, so BB (probably quitely kicking and screaming, from what little I know of him) becomes the new God.

Thus adherents say that He Has Spoken, and henceforth Fairy Stories shall be hallowed, imbued with dark meanings, and with the purpose of helping us manage our difficult inner feelings by projecting them onto a story (no quibbles, no refund).

I think of this from hearing Debussy's familiar (though thankfully off the air for a while) L'Après-Midi d'une Faune (1894), and a decent explanation - for once - of its roots in Mallarmé's poem of 1865. It requires little invention to imagine sexual sublimation (of writer, reader or listener, though, for me, the lattermost remains a stretch, as does finding the text behind other works of Claude's): the faun can safely do - or dream of doing - what we can conveniently enjoy in him, and deny as being our desire.

Which brings us to yesterday's screening, accompanied by Neil Brand and Mark Kermode (why else was everyone there?) in The Dodge Brothers, of The Ghost that Never Returns (1929), the penultimate event in the 15th British Silent Film Festival, which was hosted by the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, this year.

More to come...



End-notes

* Woody Allen's passing quip is my favourite, which goes something like During my time in therapy, my analyst retired - as he was a strict Freudian, it was only six sessions later that I realized.


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Saturday 24 September 2011

Experiences of Festival events

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

24 September

I shall (try to) be kind first, before being cruel – but, sadly, the latter is deserved.

Neil Brand’s voyage through and sample of the film music of Bernard Herrmann (Knowing the Score) was, despite the numerous technical hitches (most of which, as Neil suggested, can be blamed on the stubborn spirit of Bernie that we came to glimpse that afternoon): the on-screen presentation and the examples chosen were clear, Neil identifying the various instruments and effects as the clips ran (audio only for Psycho, with Neil talking us through the instrumentation for strings on screen) was instructive, and, above all, the enthusiasm for and energy involved in explaining the subject were patent.

Contrast that with an event called The Tartan Terror, and one is at the other end of the spectrum. When I came to write about this ‘evening’, which my friend Punyaketu and I decided to spend somewhere else (even in the face of some well-chosen segments from films distributed by Tartan: we saw part of Irreversible, Old Boy, and Man Bites Dog), I was reminded of James Naughtie in King’s chapel, supposedly interviewing another James, composer James MacMillan – as Naughtie made one well aware, he knew his interlocutor (or, more accurately, intended interlocutor) from other encounters, but, one hopes for MacMillan’s sake, not ones where Naughtie coasted, and dilated endlessly before asking questions that: were not worthy of the ticket-price that some had paid, did not leave them much space for the time that they, too, were supposed to have to ask questions, and seemed to leave the other James cold, too, though he did the best to enliven with his answers a session that was becoming dead on its feet.

Now, I wouldn’t suggest that prior consumption of alcohol played any part on either occasion, but Peter Bradshaw fell into exactly the same trap, snaring himself on the belief that, simply because something (not always very fluently – lots of ‘um’s and ‘uh’s, especially at the beginning) was coming out of his mouth, it needed to be said and said until he could think of nothing else to say.

Frankly, it does not matter whether this was billed as Hamish McAlpine (funnily, like MacMillan, another Scot, though I think that he described himself as a pretend one, after an introduction that was in danger of swallowing the whole night) in conversation or being interviewed, it was neither. It was self-indulgent and not interesting (or simply another case of the questioner forgetting why he is (meant to be) there), and, when McAlpine did (get allowed to) start speaking (after lengthy digressions or irrelevant anecdotes about being with directors at Cannes), Bradshaw was speaking affirmations (or even contradictions) into his microphone, rather than just letting the man who was meant to be his guest – and, after all, the focus of the event – talk in peace.

I gave it 1 out of 5, and had a much better conversation of my own somewhere else instead! (And I hope that poor McAlpine isn't left terrified to be invited to do anything else similar, where he might be given the opportunity to saw something...)
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Monday 19 September 2011

Monday at the festival

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 September

Four sessions (five films) to-day – should have been five, but I couldn’t count, and somehow hadn’t spotted, when booking, that one of them would be going in whilst another was still being shown, but which gives me £3.85 credit on my Blue Pass for another day.

Plus a hurry from the extravagance of seeing Douglas Fairbanks (from 1922) in and as Robin Hood in the Great Hall at Trinity (thanks to the indulgence of the college's Master and Fellows), to get back to Festival central for Tirza, of both of which more later. (Suffice to say that those who thought that they were dining in the hall, which was set up like a cinema when I arrived, must have been fed elsewhere.)

,
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